The rest of the story is well known. The corregidor Luis de la Cerda issued a decree prohibiting any mason or worker from touching a stone of the Mosque of Cordoba under penalty of death. The next day, the prelate excommunicated the mayor of the city and unleashed one of the most bizarre institutional disputes in the history of Spain. The king finally granted the bishop permission to build a huge transept in the heart of the Mezquita, and Alonso Manrique disfigured the superb Islamic oratory forever. Years later, when Charles V contemplated the havoc wrought on the monument, he uttered those famous words that legend attributes to him: “You have destroyed what was unique in the world to put in its place what can be seen everywhere”.

From a historical perspective, it was one of the first major lawsuits to be brought against the backdrop of the protection of the heritage of an architectural jewel. That battle was lost. There is no doubt about it. But time has ended up consecrating one of the most amazing examples of cultural and religious syncretism on the planet. And that is no small thing in a world in need of symbols of intercultural coexistence. From this point of view, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba is a paradigmatic icon.

November 1984 was the end of a long road. The history of the international recognition of the Mosque of Cordoba began twelve years earlier. And in a paradoxical way. So let’s go back to 1972. Spain was living the death throes of Franco’s regime and the City Council of Cordoba was ruled by Antonio Alarcón Constant, the last mayor of the dictatorship before Julio Anguita, already in 1979, inaugurated the municipal democracy.

On May 17, 1972, Antonio Alarcón convened a municipal plenary session. And before the highest body of the city he made an unexpected announcement. “Given the characteristics of our Mosque,” said Alarcón, according to the minutes of the city council, “the undersigned mayor has the honor to propose that it is agreed to submit a petition” to Unesco as a candidate for International Monument. The alderman had heard that Unesco was preparing a worldwide distinction for those emblematic buildings or natural treasures of exceptional universal value. And the Mosque of Cordoba deserved all the recognitions.

That same day he appointed a special commission to prepare a report to accredit the uniqueness of this “unique jewel of Arab art” and “the most transcendental building of all Spaniards”. Alarcón was convinced that the great Umayyad oratory of the 8th century had all the necessary characteristics to aspire to the highest planetary award. But not only that. The mayor’s move hid another objective that would soon come to light.

On July 31, 1972, Antonio Alarcón convenes a new municipal plenary session. He takes the floor. And he says the following: “The most excellent municipal Corporation has maintained throughout history and with respect to the Mosque as a unique architectural monument of the world, a position contrary to those works that attempted to undermine the integrity of the artistic monument”. Sepulchral silence in the Consistory. What the hell does the mayor mean? To what works of this kind is he referring to? It was not necessary to be very perspicacious to pull the thread. Antonio Alarcón is talking about the construction of the Cathedral on the axis of the Mosque no less than 450 years earlier. And he connects the City Hall with the frontal opposition that the corregidor Luis de la Cerda presented to that controversial episcopal initiative.

But the alderman’s words are only a brief introduction to the bombshell he is about to drop. In October 1972, Alarcón announces, the City Council of Córdoba is going to organize a meeting of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Unesco’s advisory body. What for? The mayor himself explains. “In order to carry out on the ground all the studies aimed at the conservation in all its purity of the Mosque as an International Monument”, he declared. Few in the plenary understood what exactly the alderman meant. His words hid an unprecedented project that the City Council was willing to lead. What project? Alarcón continued speaking. And he revealed the willingness of some Arab heads of government to help the Mosque of Cordoba “return as far as possible to its original state”.

The minutes of that session are the history of Córdoba. And it rests in the Municipal Archives of the city. Antonio Alarcón had just announced the execution of a stratospheric operation of architectural surgery only comparable to the relocation of the temple of Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt four years earlier to save it from the Aswan Dam. The idea was to extract stone by stone the Cathedral that Bishop Alonso Martinez ordered to raise to restore the Mosque of Cordoba to its “purity”. And Franco himself was punctually informed of the matter.

Mayor Alarcón was not alone. He was not even its precursor. The surprising project had been conceived by the famous architect Rafael de la Hoz Arderius, at the time Director General of Housing of the last Francoist government. And the candidacy of the Mosque of Cordoba for Unesco’s highest world recognition was part of a plan that also included the decoupling of the Cathedral from the monumental complex. De la Hoz and Antonio Alarcón thought that the international organization was going to validate their pharaonic architectural purification project.

But his calculations failed. And the plan would soon collapse like a house of cards. De la Hoz had important levers within the public administration. But not all of them. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts stopped the initiative in its tracks. The Icomos meeting was suspended and postponed until April 1973. By then, the project of “purification” of the Mosque had already been diluted like a sugar cube in coffee.

At the end of April, international experts convened by Icomos signed the so-called Cordoba Declaration. The document was solemnly presented in the chapel of Santa Teresa of the Cathedral Mosque under the tripartite presidency of the advisory body of Unesco, the City Council and the Bishopric. Everything had changed. The agreed text left no room for doubt. “Thanks to an admirable formal achievement, which makes it a universally admired masterpiece, the Cathedral Mosque of Cordoba, which contains in an exceptional way the expression of the meeting and overlapping of Christianity and Islam, responds so perfectly to the characteristics of the monument belonging to different cultures, that it should be considered as one of the most significant international examples and as an integral part of the cultural heritage of Humanity”.

Far from considering the Catholic addition of the 16th century as a discordant and incompatible element with the whole, the signers of the Declaration of Cordoba They hail him as a symbol of the universal embrace of cultures. And what is even better: they unequivocally endorse his candidacy for the award that is about to be inaugurated. There is no longer any doubt. The Cathedral would remain the Siamese sister of the Mosque, both united in a single body of hybrid architecture. Eleven years later, the monumental complex would be inscribed on the coveted UNESCO World Heritage List .

Since then, its international prestige has only grown. The attraction of the Cathedral Mosque increases every year all over the world. In 1984, the monument was only visited by a few thousand tourists. Forty years later, the superb Andalusian temple has already exceeded 2 million annual visitors and is approaching the records of the Alhambra. The year 2019 the two Andalusian jewels marked their historical record. While the Cathedral Mosque reached 2.1 million tourists, the Alhambra exceeded 2.7 million. The pandemic abruptly halted the unstoppable rise of cultural tourism in the two main Andalusian monuments. But four years later, four decades after they were added to UNESCO’s universal catalog, the two Islamic icons are regaining vigor and strength.